Just a Student Looking to be Inspired.

You’re getting ready to write your story. You have everything thought out and you can see your characters in your mind, but wait you haven’t named them! If you’re anything like me you struggle with this part of story building.

I have a giant baby book of names that I worship for writing. It has helped me so much, and even though I have explained it a thousand times friends still don’t understand just how big of a help it really is.

Another source is the internet, with a simple search you can find just about anything.

﻿﻿(Screen shot of the top 25 names of 2015 found on babycenter.com).

We have here a list of popular names separated by sex. As you can see there’s a lot of choices but let’s say your stuck between two, Lucas and Owen. What do you do?

That’s when you look at meaning and Origin. Every name has a meaning and origin. This will help you decide which has more in common with your character.

Lucas.

Origin: Latin

Meaning: Another form of Luke and Lucius. Meaning “light-giving” or “illumation”.

So you can see some names have many different meanings. This is where you decide which is more like your character. Is he bright and light hearted or is he strong and noble?

Now let’s say you found a name you really liked, but you don’t really care for how it’s spelled. There is many different ways you can spell certain names rather it’s Sara vs Sarah, or Cheyenne vs Shyanne. Most names will always have options.

Fantasy Character Names.

This is when the most popular list and modern names don’t exactly fit for what your looking for.

Nature names are good options, Lily, Ruza, and Sage work well for fairies and sweet woodland creatures.

Another thing is to find a meaning you want, like water, Ice and fire and do research for names that mean exactly that. You will find some creative and interesting names in different languages that may just be mystical enough like Pyry and Ahearn.

Sometimes you can find modern names with different types of spelling that will work like Rose vs Ruza.

A fun way to get new, and cool looking names is combining words and other names together!

I’ll use some of the names I’ve came up with as a example.

Gyrin (Guy + Rin)

Zelroth (Zell + Roth)

Then those that just come to you.

Dahlar pronounced like duh-lar

And those that have something to do with a emotion. Like I had taken Grummpy and turned it into a name for a little feisty house elf.

Grumpt pronounced like grum-pt.

We do have to be careful creating names that they aren’t to hard to pronounce or even read, but with these your imagination is the only thing that holds you back. You can make a endless list of names this way.

Also you don’t want your characters to have similar names, like all of them starting with the letter J. It’s okay to have two with the same letter but you must make sure that readers can tell the difference between the two characters or else it gets confusing.

It’s that time of year when children hunt for eggs, cars gather in church parking lots, and spring has officially arrived. So I want to wish everyone a good Easter! No matter what your plans are today, chilling, having fun with the kids, or cooking a feast for family and friends, take a deep breath and enjoy your time!

Sometimes when we are writing, we want to write about something that we’re not really familiar with. This is when a important key to writing comes in, this is research.

Now in the age of internet you can google just about everything, and as writers we all know just how strange some of our searches will seem. “Where can you hide in New York?”, “what monster may destroy the world?”, “how do you deactivate a bomb?”, “what kind of underwear did kings wear?”. But it’s okay, because it is dedicate to the new world you will be creating!

Just this week in my English class we have started reading a story called THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, and we have been given the task to write a narrative about someone with a psychological disorder. For some people this may seem easy, as many people could name and describe a handful off the top of their heads but that doesn’t really mean they know everything about it.

So I’ve done a lot of research this week trying to figure out what to do for mine and how to go about it. I wanted to be as real, detailed and truthful as possible. Making your readers believe in something rather it really exists or not is a big part of writing and when you have something that is apart of reality you want to give it justice. Make your readers aware of the pros and cons of what you’re writing. But this doesn’t mean to give them just facts and no imagination.

It’s hard, but as writers we have to balance those two elements, facts and imagination. We have to take the two, push them together, turn them into something inspiring and believable. We have a task, and truthfully it’s probably the reason that a lot of us stay up late and have became coffee addicted maniacs.

Another thing is we have to know where to find our information. Reading just one article isn’t going to tell you everything you need to know, and let’s be honest. . . There’s a lot of untrustworthy sources out there that we should second guess and doubt. So take your time, get comfy and get to looking because it’s going to take you a while to figure out what your going to include. Take notes and also think of your story and how it may effect it depending on the route you go!

Maybe this has given you some advice, or just a break from your own heavy searching, but I felt that this topic needed to be discussed as it seems the researching part of writing usually gets over looked.

As a writer myself I know it’s hard sometimes to find the right things for your story. Or maybe there’s something you’d like to do but you don’t know how too. We all get stuck sometimes. That’s why I am here! I am offering writing tips to anyone or would like help! Just contact me here with your question or email me at reneebellreviews@yahoo.com and we’ll get started!

1. You are the work. The work is you: both an articulation of the self and a possibility for self-reflection. Be honest in creation: allow yourself to bleed into the work, but also allow it to work on you. Your work can show you things: illuminate and clarify your own thoughts, motivations, actions. If you do it right, you will find the work changing you, too.

2. Thinking is process. Laying on the floor. Sitting on park benches. Getting lost on purpose. These are all working. Learn the difference between mindless distraction and mindful wandering.

3. Go down the rabbit hole. Sometimes the work isn’t about what you think it is. Allow yourself to get lost down alleyways, to follow a train of thought around a corner. Don’t feel you need to reign yourself in. Too much focus squeezes all the possibility for revelation out of the work.